thank you

dear jonathan safran foer,

I read your book extremely loud and incredibly close. I read it during a hard time for me, and it re-opened my eyes to the world, to a way of seeing that I had forgotten I once knew. I am 20 years old and I felt that I was oskar, his grandmother, and his grandfather all at once. it made no sense at all, and it made perfect sense. I imagine you felt the same way when you wrote it. I don't know why I can feel the deepest sorrows your characters have felt when I know that I have never felt them. yet it makes perfect sense.

I just finished your book everything is illuminated. I read it because I'd read you before and I knew it would be a genius work and would change me. it was a genius work and it changed me. it makes me proud of you. some parts were harder to read when I read them out loud to my best friend. like alex, by saying them out loud I was making them happen again. I shook and could not stop shaking.

sometimes I felt like alex, that you did not have to make the fictions of your story so horrible and crude. sometimes I was disgusted. but I know these things were necessary for you to do. I have not yet decided if this story is what happened to you. I don't think it really matters. you did not write it for me. I am a writer, too, so I understand how maybe for you, to write it was the only way to know yourself, or your past, or your maybe past, which is really you, which is really your future.

for you, everything was illuminated. for me, some things were illuminated, the true things so true that they ache me, the light ones and the dark.

I know you do not need it, but I want to tell you thank you.

christina suzanne hilton